The "Pantone Matching System" is an American colo(u)r system that is mainly used for identifying, communicating and matching ink colours. This system has subsequently become the worldwide standard in this area. The Pantone colour fans and ring binders have therefore become indispensable in the fields of graphics, advertising and printing.

Based on the 14 Pantone Basic Color inks, over 1000 so-called Pantone solid colours have been created through the implementation of various mixing ratios. These are made available to print ink manufacturers in the form of licenses so that they can then uniformly produce and sell them worldwide.

In order to represent Pantone colours in the most exact way possible even at the conceptual design stage, coloured paper, film and markers have been made available in the marketplace since the 1970´s – especially through the efforts of the Letraset company. As the conceptual design process turned more and more to digital solutions, these products became more and more irrelevant. Today, all leading DTP programs contain colour bars that are based on the Pantone standard. In addition, Pantone has in past years licensed leading proofing systems and colour printers (manufacturers), with the result that colour fidelity can be maintained all the way from conceptual design to the final print.

After the overwhelming success of the "Pantone Matching Systems" (PMS), Pantone has now come out with its own software and colour systems for textiles and plastic as well as other materials.

There are various Pantone colour fans and colour reference binders which can serve the different demands of colour communication in the world of publishing. The fans are 40 x 230 mm in size and have many colour chips per page. Like the fans, the ring binders contain many colour chips per page – and these are perforated in such a way that individual chips from a single colour can be removed and used for communication purposes. When a certain colour has been "used up", the appropriate replacement page can be ordered separately.

In 2010 the Pantone Plus Series was introduced to replace the Pantone Matching System. In addition to the already existing colours, 224 new (modern) solid colours, which were created through the mixing of the Pantone Matching System Basic Color inks, are now included. The new total is 1341 solid colours. In the new Premium Metallics colour fan or, alternatively, ring binder, 300 new metallic colours are presented. The Pastels Series now contains an additional 56 neon colours and has been renamed Pastels & Neons. Pantone Plus CMYK and Color Bridge colour fans are now printed in conformity with international ISO norms – in doing so, the separate versions for the European and American market have been dropped. FSC certified paper is used in all the fans and ring binders. The thickness of the paper matches the specifications for colour printers (coated: 100 g/m²; uncoated: 80 g/m²).

All new Pantone solid colours are printed at uniform ink thicknesses (coated: 1.3 g/m², uncoated 1.6 g/m²) and can therefore be easily matched on a printing machine.

All the fans and ring binders in the Pantone Plus Series are chromatically arranged – much different from the earlier version when the colours were sorted according to their date of introduction, with the result that all the new colours appeared at the end of the fan or ring binder. The new versions are sorted according to colour nuances and the colours on each page are arranged from light to dark. The names or numbers of the colours have not been changed – only the sequence has been altered. In order to facilitate a search, a numerical colour index providing page numbers has been added.

The ColorCheckerLightIndicator enables the optimal light conditions for viewing a colour to be found by means of a comparison of two reference colours. All products in the Pantone Plus Series include the right to download the Pantone Color Manager Software for updating the Pantone colours for all design applications.

The market demand for matte colours was not great enough to warrant the continuation of that Series.